Such was the version of the Koran with
which the English public had to be content for nearly a century; and it is
small wonder that they were not impressed. Meanwhile in 1694 the Arabic
text of the Koran was at last printed and published in full at Hamburg
under the careful editorship of Abraham Hinckelmann. This edition was
available to the worthy lawyer George Sale, when he set himself the task
of replacing Alexander Ross's translation of Du Ryer; he also had at his
disposal a new Latin rendering made by Father Maracci, which appeared at
Padua in 1698. Though Sale approached his labour better qualified and
better supplied than his predecessor, he was not troubled by motives of
scholarly impartiality. He states his position clearly enough in the first
pages of his justly celebrated version, first published in 1734 and
reprinted many times since:

‘I imagine it almost needless either to
make an apology for publishing the following translation, or to go about
to prove it a work of use as well as curiosity. They must have a mean
opinion of the Christian religion, or be but ill grounded therein, who can
apprehend any danger from so manifest a forgery.... I shall not here
inquire into the reasons why the law of Mohammed has met with so
unexampled a reception in the world (for they are greatly deceived who
imagine it to have been propagated by the sword alone), or by what means
it came to be embraced by nations which never felt the force of the
Mohammedan arms, and even by those which stripped the Arabians of their
conquests, and put an end to the sovereignty and very being of their
Khalifs yet it seems as if there was something more than what is vulgarly
imagined in a religion which has made so surprising a progress. But
whatever use an impartial version of the Koran may be of in other
respects, it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the
ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too
favourable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually
to expose the imposture.... The writers of the Romish communion, in
particular, are so far from having done any service in their refutations
of Mohammedanism, that by endeavouring to defend their idolatry and other
superstitions, they have rather contributed to the increase of that
aversion which the Mohammedans in general have to the Christian religion,
and given them great advantages in the dispute. The Protestants alone are
able to attack the Koran with success; and for them, I trust, Providence
has reserved the glory of its overthrow.’

Sale's translation was not supplanted for
some 150 years. Its influence was thus enormous; this was the Koran for
all English readers almost to the end of the nineteenth century; many even
now living have never looked into any other version. No other rendering
was in the hands of Edward Gibbon when he wrote: ‘In the spirit of
enthusiasm or vanity, the prophet rests the truth of his mission on the
merit of his book; audaciously challenges both men and angels to imitate
the beauties of a single page; and presumes to assert that God alone could
dictate this incomparable performance. This argument is most powerfully
addressed to a devout Arabian, whose mind is attuned to faith and rapture;
whose ear is delighted by the music of sounds; and whose ignorance is
incapable of comparing the productions of human genius. The harmony and
copiousness of style will not reach, in a version, the European infidel:
he will peruse with impatience the endless incoherent rhapsody of fable,
and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea,
which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.
The divine attributes exalt the fancy of the Arabian missionary; but his
loftiest strains must yield to the sublime simplicity of the book of Job,
composed in a remote age, in the same country, and in the same language.
If the composition of the Koran exceeds the faculties of a man, to what
superior intelligence should we ascribe the Iliad of Homer, or the
Pbilippics of Demosthenes?’ It was on the basis of Sale's version that
Thomas Carlyle commented: ‘It is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook,
a wearisome, confused Jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of
duty could carry any European through the Koran.’ And Gibbon and Carlyle
were in their times remarkable for the liberality of their attitude
towards Islam.

Yet the superiority of Sale to Ross is
evident in every line; not only bad he a good grasp of the Arabic
language, which his forerunner lacked totally, but his English style is
more elegant and mature. The incident of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is
rendered thus by Sale:

‘And she, in whose house he was, desired
him to lie with her; and she shut the doors and said, Come hither. He
answered, God forbid! verily my lord hath made my dwelling with him
easy; and the ungrateful shall not prosper. But she resolved within
herself to enjoy him, and he would have resolved to enjoy
her, had lie not seen the evident demonstration of his Lord. So we turned
away evil and filthiness from him, because he was one of our sincere
servants. And they ran to get one before the other to the door; and
she rent his inner garment behind. And they met her lord at the door. She
said, What shall be the reward of him who seeketh to commit
evil in thy family, but imprisonment, and a painful punishment? And Joseph
said, She asked me to lie with her. And a witness of her family bore
witness, saying, If his garment be rent before, she speaketh truth,
and he is a liar; but if his garment be rent behind, she lieth, and he is
a speaker of truth. And when her husband saw that his garment was
torn behind, he said, This is a cunning contrivance of your sex;
for surely your cunning is great. 0 Joseph, take no farther notice of this
affair: and thou, O woman, ask pardon for thy crime, for
thou art a guilty person.’

This is how Sale translates the story of
the Nativity, his carefully italicized ‘supplies’ being intentionally
reminiscent of the Authorized Version of the Bible:

‘And remember in the book of the Koran
the story of Mary; when she retired from her family to a place towards
the east, and took a veil to conceal herself from them; and we sent
our spirit Gabriel unto her, and he appeared unto her in the
shape of a perfect man. She said, I fly for refuge unto the merciful
God, that he may defend me from thee: if thou fearest him, thou
wilt not approach me. He answered, Verily I am the messenger of thy
Lord, and am sent to give thee a holy son. She said, How shall I
have a son, seeing a man hath not touched me, and I am no harlot?
Gabriel replied, So shall it be: thy Lord saith, This is easy
with me; and we will perform it, that we may ordain him a sign unto
men, and a mercy from us: for it is a thing which is decreed. Wherefore
she conceived him: and she retired aside with him in her womb to a
distant place; and the pains of childbirth came upon her near the trunk of
a palm‑tree. She said, Would to God I had died before this, and had become
a thing forgotten, and lost in oblivion! And he who was beneath her
called to her, saying, Be not grieved: now hath God provided a
rivulet under thee; and do thou shake the body of the palm‑tree, and it
shall let fall ripe dates upon thee, ready gathered. And eat, and drink,
and calm thy mind. Moreover if thou see any man, and he question thee,
say, Verily, I have vowed a fast unto the Merciful; wherefore I will by no
means speak to a man this day. So she brought the child to her
people, carrying him in her arms. And they said unto her,
O Mary, now hast thou done a strange thing: O sister of Aaron, thy father
was not a bad man, neither was thy mother a harlot. But she made signs
unto the child to answer them; and they said, How shall we speak to
him, who is an infant in the cradle? Whereupon the child said,
Verily I am the servant of God; he hath given me the book of the gospel,
and hath appointed me a prophet. And he hath made me blessed, wheresoever
I shall be; and hath commanded me to observe prayer, and to give
alms, so long as I shall live; and he hath made me dutiful towards
my mother, and hath not made me proud, or unhappy. And peace be
on me the day whereon I was born, and the day whereon I shall die, and the
day whereon I shall be raisedto life.’

Such was the voice of the Koran to
eighteenth century England; a somewhat monotonous and humdrum voice, it
may be thought, but at least an honest voice. So matters remained for well
over a hundred years. But with the nineteenth century came the rise of
oriental studies in the scientific meaning of the term; and the
interpretation of the Koran inevitably engaged the interest of scholars
eager to apply the methods of the higher criticism to this as yet virgin
field of research. Thus it came to pass that in the next translation of
the Koran to appear, the work of the Rev J. M. Rodwell, the order of the
Suras – the chapters of which the Koran is composed‑was completely
changed, with the object of reconstituting the historical sequence of its
original composition. Rodwell gives the following justification of this
somewhat arbitrary procedure:

‘The arrangement of the Suras in this
translation is based partly upon the traditions of the Muhammadans
themselves, with reference especially to the ancient chronological list
printed by Weil in his Mohammed der Prophet, as well as upon a
careful consideration of the subject matter of each separate Sura and its
probable connection with the sequence of events in the life of Muhammad.
Great attention has been paid to this subject by Dr Weil in the work just
mentioned; by Mr Muir in his Life of Mahomet, who also publishes a
chronological list of Suras, 21 however of which he admits have "not yet
been carefully fixed"; and especially by Noeldeke, in his Geschichte
des Qorâns, a work to which public honours were awarded in 1859 by the
Paris Academy of Inscriptions. From the arrangement of this author I see
no reason to depart in regard to the later Suras. It is based upon a
searching criticism and minute analysis of the component verses of each,
and may be safely taken as a standard, which ought not to be departed from
without weighty reasons.’

The result is that in order to find a
particular Sura in Rodwell’s version, first published in 1861 and taken up
by Everyman’s Library in 1909, it is necessary first to consult a
comparative table of contents, a laborious and irritating preliminary.
Since this translation has enjoyed a very wide circulation indeed, and has
been regarded by many as the standard English version, it is interesting
to consider the spirit that animated its author. It is a far cry indeed
from the intolerant hostility of the seventeenth century, the urbane
superiority of the eighteenth. Certainly Rodwell does not doubt that the
Koran was the product of Muhammad's own imagination; but his estimate of
Muhammad's character is not lacking in charity and even admiration:

‘In close connection with the above
remarks, stands the question of Muhammad’s sincerity and honesty of
purpose in coming forward as a messenger from God. For if he was indeed
the illiterate person the Muslims represent him to have been, then it will
be hard to escape their inference that the Koran is, as they assert it to
be, a standing miracle. But if, on the other hand, it was a Book carefully
concocted from various sources, and with much extraneous aid, and
published as a divine oracle, then it would seem that the author is at
once open to the charge of the grossest imposture, and even of impious
blasphemy. The evidence rather shews, that in all he did and wrote,
Muhammed was actuated by a sincere desire to deliver his countrymen from
the grossness of its debasing idolatries – that he was urged on by an
intense desire to proclaim that great truth of the Unity of the Godhead
which had taken full possession of his own soul – that the end to be
attained justified to his mind the means be adopted in the production of
his Suras – that he worked himself up into a belief that he had received a
divine call – and that he was carried on by the force of circumstances,
and by gradually increasing successes, to believe himself the accredited
messenger of Heaven. The earnestness of those convictions which at Mecca
sustained him under persecution, and which perhaps led him, at any price
as it were, and by any means, not even excluding deceit and falsehood, to
endeavour to rescue his countrymen from idolatry, – naturally stiffened at
Medina into tyranny and unscrupulous violence. At the same time, he was
probably, more or less, throughout his whole career, the victim of a
certain amount of self‑deception. A cataleptic subject from his early
youth, born – according to the traditions – of a highly nervous and
excitable mother, he would be peculiarly liable to morbid and fantastic
hallucinations, and alternations of excitement and depression, which would
win for him, in the eyes of his ignorant countrymen, the credit of being
inspired.... Still, Muhammad’s career is a wonderful instance of the force
and life that resides in him who possesses an intense Faith in God and in
the unseen world; and whatever deductions may be made – and they are many
and serious‑from the noble and truthful in his character, he will always
be regarded as one of those who have had that influence over the faith,
morals, and whole earthly life of their fellow‑men, which none but a
really great man ever did, or can, exercise; and as one of those, whose
efforts to propagate some great verity will prosper, in spite of manifold
personal errors and defects, both of principle and character. The more
insight we obtain, from undoubted historical sources, into the actual
charac­ter of Muhammad, the less reason do we find to justify the strong
vituperative language poured out upon his head by Maracci, Prideaux, and
others, in recent days, one of whom has found, in the Byzantine “Maometis”,
the number of the Beast! It is nearer to the truth to say that he was a
great though im­perfect character, an earnest though mistaken teacher, and
that many of his mistakes and imperfections were the result of
cir­cumstances, of temperament, and constitution; and that there must be
elements both of truth and goodness in the system of which he was the main
author, to account for the world‑wide phenomenon, that whatever may be the
intellectual inferiority (if such is, indeed, the fact) of the Muslim
races, the influence of his teaching, aided, it is true, by the vast
impulse given to it by the victorious arms of his followers, has now
lasted for nearly thirteen centuries, and embraces more than one hundred
millions of our race‑more than one‑tenth part of the inhabitants of the
globe.’

The Koran Interpreted - A Translation by A. J.
Arberry, A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster